


the gods are dead (worship me instead)

by ZenzaNightwing



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: A whole pit of mental illness, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Insanity, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sleep Deprivation, Suicidal Thoughts, The main character is a suicidal Nazi honestly what are you expecting, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, at least I assume, guess who made an entire religious system, honestly this is just super fucked up, just one massive trigger warning, the slow decay of a human psyche, this bitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-13 01:16:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14739345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZenzaNightwing/pseuds/ZenzaNightwing
Summary: It feels like an eternal forever and a few milliseconds before he stands on the broken, blasted out shell of an empty, shattered command center, shards of transparisteel crunching under his boots, ash tasting heavy on his tongue and dusting his hair, smoke curling through his lungs as he breathes (More sharply than normal, it's been quite a while since he's well and truly hyperventilated but now he feels like he will again.) in, making his eyes water.Below, the burnt out wreckage of a hangar is being combed over by workers, meticulously and carefully directing droids to remove pieces of debris and drag bodies of troopers out, the blaze put out for the most part, the last few sparks in this sector being extinguished methodically by featureless maintenance droids. There's a large cluster of workers over by one section of floor, issuing orders to a few sustained-flight capable mechs, carrying some burden down from where a large section of the floor had collapsed downward into the level below.(Phasma dies and Hux loses his mind to dead gods.)(He's fine, he swears.)





	the gods are dead (worship me instead)

 

 

 

He is born tired, he thinks, staring out sightlessly at whatever his surroundings are, comm pinging from a far away distance. Born to be it, born exhausted and hungry for something he can't express, into a world full of bright lights and a sneering voice, born a bastard to a woman who believed stars were gods and a man who thought they were something to be subjugated.

 

Some things never change, he supposes, as his eyes feel like they're burning and the phantom limb of power aches deep like his stomach does, and he knows he should eat something, but there isn't time and he shouldn't be just staring at a stupid wall in this stupid rebel base.

 

He turns and stumbles, catching himself on one of the containers filled beyond the brim with red chips of salt-contaminated mineral that make the air taste like tears. He opens his mouth to call out to a trooper to get the ship ready, that he needs to evaluate the wreckage of the fleet and see what he can salvage, what can be fixed, but cuts off with a gasp that makes his throat aches, that reminds him of the phantom limb again. He is not in command, not now, possibly not ever. He may not even survive this day. Ren is powerful in something Hux for once can't even control and volatile. His throat is testament to that, and thanks to the sharp breath, it now aches all the more, adding to the irritation caused by his previous screamed reiterations of orders.

 

Failure of this magnitude is new to Hux, but he's always heard that things come in threes. First, his pride and joy (Not really, it's an abomination and he doesn't know why he made it) gets blown up with some of his most loyal (He'd spent an hour mechanically giving orders while he worries for his most favored, where he'd turned to his right occasionally, expecting to either find a convenient Sith to yell at or an even more convenient Captain to conspire and talk himself down with).

 

Then he is humiliated multiple times (He wasn't even out of the room before Snoke called him a rabid cur, after all, and he hates that he smiled like the attack dog he was at that meager praise, of being something feral and useful enough to bother keeping on a leash), accentuated by having the flag ship of the fleet rend in half because he was too stupid to realize (He was tired, he knows, hasn't slept in far too long, had barely left the bridge long enough to use the fresher, and not a second more, but he should have left someone else in command, but then he would be _weakweakweakthinasaslipofpaperweakworthlessnotgoodenough)_ that the Resistance cruiser was still a very real threat.

 

Then Snoke dies (Does he feel gratified for that? That the monster is dead? No, he is not, because he knows that even in a room with Kylo kriffing R- _Long live the Supreme Leader_ and Snoke's cauterized body, he is the most corpselike abomination in this starship, and he will be next to fall to Ren's blade. Yes, he knew Ren did it, he knows because that is the second lesson the ghost of a mother teaching him through recordings gave him, he knew and he doesn't say a thing, because he doesn't have the air, and he always knew Ren would commit regicide some day anyway.) and he stares into the eyes of a monster he had been a second away from putting down like a _rabid cur_ and pledges fealty to the _chil-_ ( _Long live the Supreme Leader_ ) like he's some messiah, some destined boy-king (He refuses to look at Ren, now the last remnant of a religion on the same way down to extinction as the Jedi, as some grand, mythical figure.) and he ends the day getting thrown into another wall and having to watch as the Resistance they were so close to wiping off the map becomes transcendent of the pain of this damn planet and escapes into the deep unknowns of space.

 

He wants to sleep, he needs to sleep. He hasn't slept since the scarlet, hasn't closed his eyes longer than five minute transport trips since the bright red beam of light broke the upper atmosphere and something in his chest died with the billions on Hosnian, hasn't because he knows the second he does he will be greeted by ghosts of those he doesn't entirely regret killing, and they will consume him whole.

 

He needs out. Damn the potential consequences, he needs out of this mine, needs to escape from the place that echoes madly with failure, needs to go somewhere where it would dissolve into the air like the screams on his tongue, he needs it like the blood in his veins, need it like breath-

 

He can't breathe. How strange. Distantly, his feet crunch over the ground in a steady, purposeful gait, not pounding over the salted earth like something uncivilized, but fast enough that every trooper moves out of his way instinctually, despite his fall from grace. Its pittance, perhaps, but it's something, and it is infinitely better than having to shove his way through, stumbling shakily because he drank his last cup of caf before the Su- Snoke smacked him into the ground, and the stim he took before that is making its lack known very suddenly.

 

The air outside isn't much better, still tastes like tears, but he see a sky, can take hesitant yet harsh breaths, can stop suffocating, can start screaming himself even rawer than he feels now, but he doesn't do the last. He can't afford it right now.

 

He looks out over the battlefield they won and lost, painted red, but not with blood, the crater before the door a deep, open, weeping sore on the landscape, darker as the layers form, that held the ghost of a man he was raised to fear with the same certainty as his father. All he could think and he picked himself up from the ground and looked out of the viewport was that Skywalker, standing against the ch-( _Long live.)_ that he now knows with absolute certainty is his nephew, looked small and weak yet unimaginably powerful, and also, that he is not real. He knows, even before the only remaining Jedi takes a step, and does not leave behind a bloody footprint, and he doesn't know why.

 

He looks out over a plain etched with lines of red and the massive pockmarks where the walkers lay their feet, like pools where a dead soldier used to lay, and thinks of the scarlet he knows. He knows of Temaht, the twin god to Elsma'en, the red star of death and justice to her blazing blue of life and serenity, he knows of the flames he has watched civilizations burn under, knows it as the color of his hair, of Ren's saber and all of his Knight's, of the Imperial Guard, now dead and gone (and this was not only Ren's work, he knows, just as it is not solely the scavenger's), of blood, of (Now, I am become death) the destroyer of worlds' sickly light, of Ren's blood in snow (And it had been so tempting to some creature in the back of his head, to pull out the blaster then and put him out of his misery, to stand before Snoke (Am I my brother's keeper?) and lie. He hadn't, he had pulled him from the drift and escaped from his monstrous creation with mere seconds to spare, watched the planet rupture and burn ~~_redredred_~~.).

 

He is intimately familiar with a thousand shades, has spit them out in gobs, painted walls with them, watched them fountain from three thousand yards away with a sniper rifle, has lit a cigarette with a hundred flickering beautifully, has tamed it down and away from his face carefully, has stood in front of some dark, lurid shade and spit vitriol, then watched another decimate an entire system.

 

He loves red and he hates red, it marks his greatest failures and mistakes, his greatest achievements and victories. He has watched it take everything from him (He did get his hair color from his father after all, watched him shoot the only person who ever truly loved him and then gave him the gun to use as his officer pistol, when he inevitably crawled his way up the ranks like some howling beast.) and used it to take everything from his enemies ( _The loathsome Republic_ , he hisses, and thinks, _are you proud of your murderer yet, father?_ Even though the Parnassos Beetle was gold the wound it left was red and he had smirked when he watched his father scratch it and then gave the sharpest of smiles to his accomplice, the one with a name that belonged in the stars, and not wasting away on some dying planet.).

 

His comm beeps again, and he can actually hear it, glances down to acknowledge it and takes a sharp inhale through the nose at the number of folders with new notifications in his inbox that pop up from the holographic sidebar interface he'd upgraded his with. The newest one is from some faceless officer that uses the same mask of indifferent professionalism as every other person in the First Order, about the evaluated damage to one of the hundred hangars on the Supremacy, a pre-recorded thing, because though he will evaluate issues, he refuses to deal with live feeds he does not initiate. Something about the designation bothers him.

 

He's skimming through it, barely listening as he goes over every folder, despairingly making certain that this isn't a server error, no one has the wrong address, just that _everything_ is now his to deal with, when another pops up from the same officer.

 

His blood runs cold for a reason he can't name as he selects the new one, showing the officer, hat off and face twisted in a grimace.

 

“ _Sir, we've found Captain Phasma's body.”_

 

He doesn't register falling to his knees, the salt that covers the planet and marks out the site of the battle staining his knees white, making the ground bleed (deaddeaddeadbrokendead), doesn't feel the thing caving in his heart because his mind, as weak and addled, as misty and broken and labyrinthine as it has been made, overpowers the crushing sensation on his chest with the whispers (deaddeadgonedead) of some fallen Empire.

 

He doesn't register standing, looking like a corpse, knees stained white and red, eyes unfocused and glassy, hands shaking where they wait by his side, instead of the parade rest they seem infinitely frozen into, hair still gelled back in a sick parody of itself, like a body prepared wrongly by a mortician with only a passing interest in what he looked like in life, and walking back through the jagged hole in the door. He doesn't (deadfallennevercomingbackwhywhy _why_ ) register walking past the stationed guards outside the makeshift Resistance command center, entering a room that is thick with the smell of metal and ozone and tears, emanating even stronger from the pool of black oil that rises from the ground in some sick parody of humanity, pulsing in time with what in another world might be breath.

 

“Supreme Leader.” He says in a voice that seems almost too quiet to be his, husky and choked, and he is thrown back into himself with the pain of talking, but he is not unconscious of what he's done, he just can't think of what he should say (deadwhywhatcouldkillhernoshecan'tpleaseno) to express what is necessary, what he needs, and feels the labyrinth expand ever deeper, some great indestructible lion prowling the corridors and mauling the string the wise leave behind them until they are lost within it. The maker included.

 

But it's all Ren needs, to hear the title spoken, for his head to snap up from whatever trance he had held himself in, for what seemed like some eldritch being to unfurl into something disgustingly human, some fragile, weak thing that doesn't seem like it deserves the title it has taken. Sure, Snoke had looked like some kind of rotting fruit, had lazed around on a throne all day and made calls to ensure the few important officials that ruled his new Order were doing something that perpetuated his agenda of subversion and subjugation and the subtle rewriting and reframing of a past that seemed more distant each passing day (He is not naive, he knows that one of Snoke's goals was to make sure the Jedi fell into obscurity, because now when someone says the Order, it is not a temple that comes to mind, but a fleet of star destroyers and _~~redredred~~_ burningtheRepublictotheground), but whenever Hux was in his presence, even his infinite maze came close to buckling, under the insurmountable weight his presence had held.

 

Ren shoulders past Hux and he breathes through his nose, breathes (howdidshediewasitmyfaultdidIkillherallmyfaultIshouldn'tbealive) and follows on his heels like a (rabid cur) dog, follows like a step away from the newly minted Supreme Leader will kill him, when it's more likely he'll die by his hand by the time Crait's star rises again. He walks near this bo- ( _Long. Live._ ), with a messy nest of hair that would somehow look beautiful with golden laurels like a crown of thorns digging harshly into his scalp, like he will be his salvation. He's ready to believe in all the false gods he needs to keep some kind of faith on this godless planet.

 

The Upsilon gleams darkly under the failing light, like some portent of death, a murder of crows staring balefully out, beady eyes glittering with knowing cruelty, cawing brokenly like he would sound if he screamed and there's some mocking voice (deadgonebrokenloseforever _yourfault_ ) that screams meaningless words and platitudes that feel more like curses, like the most acidic of tongues.

 

He blinks, and in the dark space between, the crows take flight and the voice disappears.

 

He follows his Supreme Leader aboard and does not think about scarlet. Does not think about the crunch of salt under his boots that leave behind blood he did not spill this day, but leaks from the billions of wounds he has given the shambling corpse of a government, grappling against the slow, haunting behemoth of the Empire.

 

He follows and sits like something mechanical, like a droid turned human (They used to call him that, as he rebuilt an Empire from the ghostlike bones of a hated thing, as he tore his fathers stormtrooper program down and remade it into his own, as he became the face one associated with the name Hux, as he became the youngest General in the First Order, as he ordered the deaths of billions with the casual way one might order a new pair of socks off the holonet, and with the same weight. He is not, though. Droids are not weak like him ( _thinasaslipofpaper_ ) and they don't break themselves into feverish pieces over a few unfortunate losses) and tries to forget why he is shaking minutely, under all of his many guarding layers.

 

He tries not to notice that as he closes his eyes, ghosts come to greet him, the spirits of Hosnian seeking revenge.

 

He tries not to notice the shuddering breath he gives, as it gets caught halfway through and turns into something dangerously close to a sob (can'tshowweaknessnowisnotthetimeIcan'tcan'tcan't).

 

He tries not to notice the weight of the new Supreme Leader's eyes as he desperately clings onto something shredded and mutilated he might once have called his composure.

 

He tries not to notice the singular tear that slips down from his traitorous left eye.

 

It tastes like Crait.

 

 

 

His true-mother, the bastard-bearing scullery maid had slipped a recording of herself into his room the day before his father killed her and made him watch.

 

It wasn't a holo, no, she didn't have the wages for that, but an audio recording was sufficient for what she gave.

 

Stories of a beyond, of the balance that bleeds into everything, that requires the concept of order breed monsters of chaos into existence, that dies with gods and is reborn as their light begins to fade.

 

There once was a concept, and her name was Elsma'en. She was made by the Great Beyond, and its thousand voids, brought into existence to bring a thousand million billion creatures into creation, to make new things to populate the lonely Beyond. A creature of selfish nature, but she was kind to those she favored, and she loved every creature she made. The system she had made her body was especially favored, surrounding her blue light and basking in it all. The other planets she made tried to get closer to her light, but she rejected them and sent them spinning off into the outer reaches of her grasp.

 

One day, her creations started to overfill the planets she had given them, and she was frustrated. “Tell me, my children,” she said to a field of her people, all staring blankly at her radiance, “Why must you fill your homes so? Is only a few of you not good enough for the rest?”

 

The Red Sister, Akozé, first to be named, first of her name, stood, and with a leaf wrapped around her eyes, responded thus, “Oh, Great Mother, Creator of the Creator, you make your people weak and unsuited for thinking right, even now they look at you and are blinded by your light, for you have spoken that one must see that which one dares to speak of.”

 

Elsma'en was disheartened, “What mean you, oh Daughter of my Daughter? Come now, take off your mask and let me see you, for we must meet eye to eye to truly understand one another. The others can speak for themselves, so let them gaze upon the face of the one that dares claim themselves as their herald!”

 

Akozé scoffed at the order from her deity, “I would go blind, Lady above all Ladies, if I did. For your radiance far outshines any mortal light, and I cannot look at it without being drawn to it, simply a moth to a flame. You do not allow the shadows that should be to thrive, and these people will fall to the Great Night when the Natural Night comes, oh Empress of Creatures. Your other creations would not dare to say a word, for the ability to speak does not make them intelligent.”

 

Elsma'en grew angry, though this was not her way, as she championed serenity, “Tell me then, Scum of my Creation, why you commit yourself to such heretical philosophies!”

 

And the Sister replied, “I follow the true god, Temaht, for He is the Light in His Darkness, He will keep me safe when the Beyond steals all the other lights from the sky, including you, oh Mistress of my Making. For He makes your creations better with his destruction, and he will make us through trials. You, Goddess of Beginning, make us weak and moldable to your will, He will make us into something more beautiful than you could imagine.”

 

Elsma'en grew even angrier and threw herself towards the Sister, but Akozé turned into a crow and flew away into the stars, her laugh chasing her journey. As she flew, the leaf around her eyes fell back to the ground and grew into a tree, tall and mighty, and Elsma'en could not break it with her nature, could only watch as the _akoz_ tree grew and bloomed and spilled its seeds on the ground for its hearty offspring to come forth and prove to Elsma'en that creation, though her duty, wasn't her power alone with leaves as red as Temaht's form and bark as pale ivory as her skin.

 

Akozé spreads truths through tales, which she tells to a people blinded by their loyalty in the same way she blinded her eyes before her first goddess. She goes to those in suffering and gives them the tools to free themselves, teaches them to fly beyond the stars, with her black hair and pale skin and red leaves over her eyes. She is The One Who Teaches Truth, she is The Talemaker Of The Gods, she is the Crow Daughter, she is Temaht's Chosen Warrior.

 

For it will always be the greatest irony, that the god of war will fight with a peacemaker.

 

This is a lesson against apathy turned to anger too quickly. Of hubris and those who believe they are the supreme.

 

There are a thousand variations, a thousand lies of gods that have become truths, a hundred first meetings between Akozé and Elsma'en, ones in which the crow falls to the ground and dies and every tale after is shepherded by her conspirators and siblings, ones where the leaf falls away and Akozé is already blind, but sees far more than even a goddess that made the ones that preluded the ones that made her, ones in which she is as devout as the others around her, but begins to question now, and ones in which she is a tree that speaks with the voices of those that roost in her branches.

 

Listen to the forests, and you will hear the crows laughing in the branches of the _akoz_.

 

Listen to these tales, and you will learn.

 

 

 

He does not look askance to the Supreme Leader before he is rushing out of the transport, ignoring the ranks of troopers hastily assembled (Not by Phasma, not her, because sheisdeadgoneandhefeelslikeheiscrumblinglikeStarkiller) to greet their General and their new Supreme Leader (There was a quick memo sent out in the chaotic space between when his throat caved in and they landed on Crait, something short and worryingly vague. _Supreme Leader Snoke is dead. Kylo Ren now rules the First Order. Long live the Supreme Leader._ ).

 

Who knows, maybe when he gets back, he'll get Force-choked to death by the current most powerful man in the galaxy, just for his past insolence and his present disregard for command (Hypocrisy, from a man who never listened to what was his minder if not his commanding officer told him to do. Ren never had listened, not once. Now, that doesn't seem to matter anymore.), but there is not a single part of him that actually gives a kriff.

 

The hallways are nothing but chaos, utter and complete, officers and troopers and maintenance workers alike running with no concern for decorum. He slips into the writhing, pulsating mass of people and abandons any of his previous shreds of control, sprinting and shoving past everyone in a blur of black and red and pale skin (like Akozé taking flight, turning into something beautiful and/or dead that will survive as civilizations fall with skin ivory enough to be a corpse's, haloed ( _AreYouAnAngel?_ ) with the color of blood, like the bastard mother had looked, crumpled and glassy with _~~redredred~~_ spread over the floor.) with the slowly clawing, crawling beast of desperation bursting up from his throat, spreading thick tendrils over his mind and binding it in slow, destroying moments.

 

He knows these ships like they are a childhood home, knows each hallway as veins in the great monsters he has reinvented slowly with the aching, burning, bright darkness that lives in his mind, that ensnares everything and breaks them down into something unrecognizable (somethingmorethanthenothinghehasbeenandbecome) and beautiful in the way a poisoned blade is, glinting sharply with the kiss of venom and steel. He knows every mapped hallway, doesn't even bother trying any of the lifts, striding forward far too fast to be proper, with a reckless abandon that would ruin his reputation if anyone could even recognize him as he is now, half-broken and half-feral and all pathetic.

 

It feels like an eternal forever and a few milliseconds before he stands on the broken, blasted out shell of an empty, shattered command center, shards of transparisteel crunching under his boots, ash tasting heavy on his tongue and dusting his hair, smoke curling through his lungs as he breathes (More sharply than normal, it's been quite a while since he's well and truly hyperventilated but now he feels like he will again.) in, making his eyes water.

 

Below, the burnt out wreckage of a hangar is being combed over by workers, meticulously and carefully directing droids to remove pieces of debris and drag bodies of troopers out, the blaze put out for the most part, the last few sparks in this sector being extinguished methodically by featureless maintenance droids. There's a large cluster of workers over by one section of floor, issuing orders to a few sustained-flight capable mechs, carrying some burden down from where a large section of the floor had collapsed downward into the level below.

 

His eyes flick around this impersonal tomb, right hand ticking out a harsh rhythm against his left as he swallows in every detail, from every last burst pipe to the sparking wires and the smoke rising in whips and wisps, crawling out of the flickering light of the magnetic shield being stabilized by a largely human maintenance crew and being sucked out into space, formless and holding the dust of faceless soldiers, lain out in neat rows, armor melted and corrupted, colors staining where the joints of the white plating meet, helmets undisturbed, leaving them like some sickly barcode of the faceless dead, anonymous and unknown, indistinguishable from the next except for by their blood spatter.

 

He can't see the distinctive chrome (The armor he had helped her to forge from something that used to be the most Imperial thing of all, that she had worn proudly, slipped a helmet over eyes blue as Elsma'en's star as she slipped a blaster into his hand, watched him behind expressionless eyes he walked ten paces away and fired, striking between those empty pits, having to duck as it ricocheted back at him. She had dropped to her knee and pledged an oath of loyalty to him then with the edge of some laughing predator as he stood, left hand shaking minutely even though he'd already been a sniper for three years at this point, the scorch mark marking the spot right behind where his head is now, instead of marring where hers would've been, leaking ~~_redredred_~~ onto the floor.) anywhere among the white beetle shells distinctive of the monster he had reimagined and remade, brought back to existence with a tithe paid in lightning, brought a lifeless beast back to life with the maniacal light of a man with something to prove.

 

He knows she is dead ( _FoundCaptainPhasma'sBody_ ) and he knows that it isn't a lie, but there is still some distant part that hopes with something that burns deep and slow that the officer somehow managed to fool him, that he can find him later and wring his neck for the insolence, that he can sit quietly next to Phasma, either as she lays in a hospital bed, unconscious and slack but unimaginably mighty all the same, or by her crooked, sharp smile that makes her eyes look like a soulless creature's as he dares to close his eyes again.

 

He needs her. He needs her because of a thousand things. She stood beside him when Ren arrived, told him of her experiments with the FN corps, had sat in his room every Primeday and drank whatever he had on hand, would tell him every secret she had, of the people she had killed, of the genocide of everyone but her brother that she had orchestrated, had met him as a monster to a monster. A beast named for the stars and blood, in whatever kind of disastrous alliance she had with General Starkiller.

 

He needs her because she had pressed her fingers against the bruises he would gain for his failures against Snoke until he no longer feared them, because he knew that he would come back to find Phasma and she would soothe them with the ache she made as she stared him down with eyes like an ocean full of murderous, massive creatures thirsting for blood. She had been there after Snoke realized that just tossing him around wasn't good enough to inspire that terror, and neither was going into his mind and corrupting and tainting everything in his head, because even the stuff that wasn't already dark was grounded by ( ~~ _blueblueblue_~~ ) unfathomable depths. She had been there and held a shock baton a centimeter from his face and he hadn't flinched even though it was the same electric blue as Snoke's lightning, had run her fingers down the Lichtenberg figures branching down from his shoulders, and he hadn't feared him anymore because of the ( ~~ _blueblueblue_~~ deaddeadgonevercomingback) bright, bloodthirsty smile she would always give before she slipped her helmet on and turned into something prim and proper, something cultured, and he would smile because his twin monstrosity was playing dress-up with him to be something near-human.

 

He needs her, but there is a jagged hole where he has always felt her, attached to the phantom limb of power so closely that the aches blend together (They had kissed a grand total of once, and then never did it again, because it felt so very wrong, and if they ever forced themselves to try anything more, one of them would rip the other to shreds.) into something deep rooted, as much a part of him as darkness.

 

The droids pull up the thing they had so carefully worked to bring to the surface.

 

Silver chromium glints in the light, bright and melting into waxy patterns, metal ridged and wavy from the heat, folded over itself strangely, melted and burned through sections of skin, forged into a human form, a hole in the helmet giving view to ( _redredred_ ) emptiness that fades to black. The helmet is melted almost like the glimpses he caught of Ren's dilapidated Vader mask, oddly disfigured, dripping strangely, looking even more skull-like than before in death, with empty sockets, like a mask for a demon in some drama.

 

He imagines that even from here, as they pull a corpse now more metal than flesh from the smoke, he can smell it. That the charred flesh and burned hair mixes with the armor polish she used and the sprigs of Keneloe she kept in her helmet (It was popular among field medics and those sent out after battles to find the wounded among the dead, strong enough to block out smells fresh and even more pungent when shot with a blaster beforehand) to distract from the smell of blood.

 

He doesn't know how he's still standing. How he waits there in parade rest and doesn't curl up and keel over and lose whatever meager contents his stomach might hold, how he isn't shaking, how he's still breathing and not screaming something (deadgoneIknowit'smyfaultwhy _whywhy_ ) into the hangar, something into the echoes of the labyrinth in his head.

 

He doesn't know (whyhownononono) how, he (notlikethisshewasstronghowcouldsheeverfall) doesn't know why, he doesn't (someone'sfaultisitmineitmustbeminebutsomethingdidthishowdidhereyepiecegettaken) know any (thetraitoritshisfaulthekilledherhehastopay) reason anymore, he do(howdaretheytakehershewasfireandsunand)esn't know anything (paypaythetraitorwillpayIwillmakehimpayhewillburnlikeshedid) at all but this.

 

(IWillHaveVengeance.)

 

 

 

Elsma'en met Temaht when he became her binary star.

 

He came to her in his Talemaker's colors, the trappings of War itself, in white and black, and he burned red so brightly that he burnt all of his follower's blood to be his color by his mere existence.

 

“Who are you, Intruder to the True Peace,” she said, “How dare you come so close to your Mother in Creation! You trespass, Lost Child, return back to your system!”

 

Temaht bowed to her, and spoke, “You are no Mother of mine, First Making of the Beyond. I am your rival, my Lady, sent by the Great Parent.”

 

“How dare you!” Elsma'en responded, “I am the goddess of creation and life, serenity and peace, conception and death, I am the Judge of Existence, I make worlds from breath!”

 

Temaht laughed harshly, and his voice became the shattering and glass and the screams of the fearful, for he knew of her many titles already, and matched her, “I am the god of war and suffering, emotion and change, evolution and darkness, I am the God of Justice, I see sins and virtue and I decide who is reborn and fades.”

 

Elsma'en grew all the angrier, “You cannot beat me, Fool of the Void, for I create all belief in the minds of creatures.” She believed that her only rule was that which is Absolute, and that which was Hers. “They listen to me, their only true deity, Elsma'en the Maker!”

 

Temaht smiled, for he knew he had won already, “You cannot lie to me, Sister-of-Stars, for I see through all lies.” He was a thousand discordant voices all making proclamations they would not abide by and promises they would not keep, for conflict was his home. “I raise creatures to be great, as the god of the godless, Temaht the Keeper.”

 

Elsma'en became all the more incensed and threw herself at him for daring to name himself her equal and for taking her people from her, but Temaht smiled sharply and embraced her in response, and thus their astral forms fell into a forever embrace. Temaht burned blue for their confrontation as his form settled, then stared out over the land like a baleful red eye against Elsma'en's massive blue being.

 

Elsma'en howled, her championed serenity far from her selfish grasp, “You are no Brother of Mine, Broken Being, you dare to name yourself as mine in balance! You dare take the Beyond's grace in vain, you foolish Being of Falsehood, I cast you off!”

 

And Temaht, who felt the fires of his followers burning as they grew strong, smiled all the more savagely, “Oh, Great Sister, you cannot escape me now, for we are bonded forever. I am your Brother, Elsma'en, now and forever. We are meant to bring balance to the Beyond, and you cannot ignore the unfilled voids.”

 

“I hate you!” she hissed, struggling to free herself from his grasp like it was fire burning her skin and her star burned all the brighter.

 

And Temaht laughed with the harshness of brother's blade against brother's blade, left her to burn alone as he walked away to tend to his followers, and responded thus, “You forget, you cannot lie to the Red God.”

 

It is said that someday their chosen will meet in battle, and the galaxy will shake with the weight of their blows. But many things are said and not all of them are true, as mortals steal morsels of truth from the Crow Daughter and make them into stories.

 

There is no lesson to this but that gods of war will always be most comfortable in confrontation, while beings of peace will sacrifice that which they hold dear to win something pointless.

 

A billion stories of them, lies becoming truths, a million telling of the Goddess of Spiteful Serenity first meeting the God of Brutal Honesty, ones in which they decimate planets and spread them over the galaxy as proof of their rivalry, ones in which he obliterates her prized creations, because if she says only a few beings for every planet is good enough, then a few planets for the void would be enough, ones in which she loves him irreversibly and the stories all end with them locked together, spinning in the abyss.

 

Look to the ghost of a system, where the light has not translated them into their destruction yet, and you will see a great blue creature with a red sentinel.

 

Listen to these tales and you will learn.

 

 

 

He stands there for an uncountable period of time, simply staring down to where Phasma lays, her armor imbedded under her skin, encasing her bones like she is more machine than woman. He can hear all the cracks officers will make when they think they're far enough away that he will not hear their comments, about the mythical Chromium Bitch of the First Order finally becoming as much a droid as she always seemed like.

 

He can hear the choking gasps they will make when he buries the tiny knife he keeps in a wrist sheath into their jugular and the sticky sensation of the ( _redredred_ ) blood cascading over his carefully shined cufflinks, sticking in the seams of his gloves and spilling little tiny drops over his ivory features. He can see the looks they would give him when he yanked the blade out of the bloody mess and wiped it clean on the uniform, the horrified stares they would give when he would stand and glare glassily at all of them, all black and broken porcelain, coated in the (redreddeadgonered) last legacy of the mess of what once may have been something more than a morbid example.

 

Somewhere in the time between when he'd thought and the vivid imagination, he'd picked himself out of the room with the broken glass and into the place with twisted metal and smoke rising up, stood next to the mangled barcode made of dead troopers, next to the mass of bright silver that had once known his dreams like he hers. Silver, not bearing any scorch marks, but melted down in to be part of the woman he had known once, the woman he had loved with whatever was left in his shriveled husk of a heart, that had stood by him when he was given a fleet that didn't entirely trust him, that had always been there with her ( _blueblueblue_ ) darkness unhidden when he felt like he was falling apart.

 

It takes longer than perhaps it should before someone recognizes and realizes that the General of the First Order, now perhaps the most powerful man on the First Order High Command given his past as co-commander with the now Supreme Leader, is currently standing in their midst. A hit to the shoulder paired with a quick whisper to a fellow worker, a covert alert to the others in the bay, and they stand to attention at almost the same time.

 

The bay is eerily silent now, except for the sparking of wires and hissing of pipes, and the utterly distracted team currently working to keep the magnetic shield operational and prevent them from all being sucked out into the vacuum of space.

 

He doesn't say a single word, simply stands there, dusted in white ash and salt, trailing it on his overcoat, carefully combed hair dangerously close to falling over his left eye, covering it in ( _redredred_ ) shadowy streaks of scarlet. Her left is uncovered, must've been that way when she fell, and the space where the eyepiece broke off ( _redredred_ crimsondead) looks into an empty, burnt eye socket. There are no more oceans, glinting with murder or mischief or both anymore, no laughing with eyes closed, no sitting next to him and crying for reasons neither of them can explain except that they've met some unspoken biological limit and their bodies require them to shed tears even if their emotions aren't in on it.

 

He was half right about the smell. The skin and keratin are putrid and deep, but the armor polish is not as strong as he thought it would be. The Keneloe gives off a wild scent, mellow and deep, sprigs burnt to a crisp.

 

Carefully, as if the act will break him, he slowly floats downward into kneeling, a smooth, soft movement that feels more like the slow motion capture of some meteor rocketing through the atmosphere of a planet to completely destroy everything once it hits. His hands fold into his lap automatically as he bows his head, hair finally giving out to the battle with gravity and falling over his eyes.

 

 _You will be a forever,_ he thinks, tracing words he cannot say out loud on the back of his hand, _You will be an eternal creature. The stars will tremble before your name, and lightning will follow the footsteps of your spirit._

 

Years ago, when they were both the savage young things they were with that unique brand of naiveté of venomous creatures that didn't realize their own potency, she had taught him how to properly kill with nothing but fingernails and teeth, with a rock or a datapad, had given him the cufflinks that carried tiny nano-explosives for easy sabotage, assassination, or suicide.

 

In return he taught her how to smile and make promises without having to break a single oath later on, how to hide any ticks and bluff with all of the brutal half-honesty of a practiced politician, how to run a successful cover up (Field experience, really, after all, it was the lessons they had learned together and solidified cleaning up the mess the tiny gold beetle had left behind.), and the almost poetically savage language of the ghostly remains of a once proud society and the only claim of heritage to an army of one man.

 

Mando'a wasn't a particularly popular language in the galaxy, but he had learned it regardless, because all of the best warriors came from Mandalore (He had thought that before he'd met her because he was taught so, but the moment he looked on her, standing by his father with something poisonous and deadly lurking under her skin, he became a true believer in the god(dess) of war.). He had believed that learning to speak the words of the greatest warrior society that had once existed would be, if nothing else, an interesting party trick. He'd taught Phasma what he knew, because if she could speak the language of the warrior as fluently as the language of violence, he could finally have someone to converse with in it, and it became a covert way to talk in code while they were being scrutinized for their every move.

 

They both used their teachings well. This is his third pair of cufflinks, after all.

 

He grabs onto them now, feels the almost invisible ridges in the metal that made his name in her runes, and allows himself this destroying, consuming moment of emptiness, this burning, bleeding, raw mess of emotion to overwhelm until he is in the eye of the storm for a few, precious, uncountable seconds.

 

“ _Nu kyr'adyc,_ ” he whispers, even though his throat burns from it and he can practically feel the bruises forming, “ _sh taab'echaaj'li._ ” It feels right, somehow, in this room of the featureless dead, clothed in armor inspired by the faceless victims of an old war, to use their adopted language, rather than something distractingly Imperial or Republican or otherwise. The language of publicized slaves in a place built off the backs of their labor.

 

(He remembers the day he decided to teach her to speak in the tongue of blood, told her some of his favorite terms. She had laughed when she'd heard what 'hello' and 'goodbye' translated to exactly, laughed and laughed until it started to sound a bit choked, and then sat back up straight like nothing had happened, swiping one finger over the top of her cheek to catch a singular, small tear.

 

“It's funny,” she'd said, fingers skimming over the list of verbs thoughtfully, “up until it isn't anymore.” She'd chuckled again, but this time there was a more visible bite to it, like a cobra rather than some bloodsucking parasite carrying incurable pathogens.)

 

He stands. This room holds nothing for him now but smoke and ash and something he can no longer call the only being he had ever trusted. “ _Ret'urcye mhi,_ _ner vod._ ” He intones, low and soft but with something more and less than the previous words. Something a bit less honorary, something wistful and something regretful and something almost... prophetic.

 

He will see her again, he swears it. He will meet her again when the Great Night comes and she greets him as blood fills his lungs, will see her in every flicker of flame, will gaze out over oceans he has conquered and see her staring back. He will see her in the glint of weaponry and in the ranks of her perfect and perfectly faceless army, will feel her in every bruise he gains, in every pair of eyes he stares at and sees fire reflected back in their iris.

 

He turns to the closest worker, some doe-eyed mechanic, and glares him down with the steel he has always held in his eyes, and sees the flames that mirror what's behind him and what he is. “I want Captain Phasma's helmet delivered to my quarters.” Orders are a language he speaks as well, more fluently than any other, ingrained in him since childhood, used since he was given a squadron and realized he could make them punch _vod_ without hesitation. “I suggest you get someone competent on it.”

 

He sweeps out of the room in a flurry of black and ivory, leaving behind ( _redredred_ againstsilverbloodagainststeel) a room of workers hesitantly falling back into their work.

 

The hallways have not quieted, have not changed much from the original crush, but they seem almost silent and ordered compared to the thoughtless, formless screeching roar of sound that echoes through his skull like some timeless, eldritch abomination with a thousand mouths, mourning something too great and unexplainable to even think of.

 

The hallways twist knowingly in front of him, and as he walks (Walks this time, not the reckless, pointless sprinting he'd done before, to greet a room full of smoke and corpses and uselessness.) the others around him feel something akin to the fear of the gods instilled in their bones. He is something young and burning, he is something that will fall apart and take everything down in the process, and he walks among them like a rancor in porgs clothing, like some ancient spirit of death that will kill everything it has ever touched.

 

The hub is in chaos. Turbolifts zoom up and down in their tubes, packed almost to bursting with crew, and others mill around restlessly in an ever changing blob of an organism. It parts like the sea before a messiah for him, instinct telling every being to diverge from his path, molten and burning as it is, something closer to a volcano than a man.

 

A lift zooms back down, but no one dares to get on with him, with hands that shake very lightly in fists by his side, with hair knocked out of the careful order, hiding the redness under his eyes with the brightness of the ~~_redredred_~~ scarlet and the eyes that sing with fractures in discordant chorus, with edges of the steel blue.

 

He takes the ride upward into the higher levels of the ship, where his quarters must be, and thinks of the many ways he could die today. Maybe he'll get choked to death, maybe eviscerated with a lightsaber, maybe tossed out of an airlock cleanly (Not his style, fat chance of that happening.), maybe tossed into a trash compactor and smashed into bloody oblivion, maybe just a hand extended and the sudden spiral of unconsciousness coming up to greet him, to be dealt with without any way for him to fight back or spit something hurtful.

 

Maybe another officer will take offense, and in the utter chaos, slip him some poison or shoot him in the head or strangle him or stab him or torture him into oblivion. Or maybe a rebel agent inside the Order will, who is he to say? Maybe a trooper will misfire or blame him for the death of ~~_blueblueblue_~~ their Captain and take it upon themselves to avenge it. Maybe a remaining Republic cruiser will crash into the Supremacy, or fire on it until it's nothing but smithereens, and end this damn war along with the bastard scum of a creature who didn't deserve to live either.

 

Maybe he'll pull out the blade in his sleeve and slit his throat now and gag to death on his own blood before the lift finally arrives at his floor, or use his blaster or cufflinks for the same result. Maybe he'll sit in the fresher and cut his wrists open wide and watch the ~~_redredRED_~~ blood spill until Akozé's dark wings carry him away. Maybe he'll burn in his own fire and simply stop breathing, or maybe he'll stop the lift and walk until he reaches an open pocket of space gashed from this technological ~~_nightmare_~~ miracle and step out until he's just more burning flotsam in the inky black outside.

 

Or maybe he'll have something done to him, more horrible and unspeakable than any of these things he imagines.

 

Because maybe he'll survive past this wretched today.

 

Maybe he'll keep breathing and existing and thinking beyond the unthinkable horizon of the present, maybe he'll keep this monstrosity called Hux alive until this broken moment in time that stretches on into an infinity as the even more horrendous concept of the _today_ becomes only a ghost as _yesterday_. Maybe he'll be there when it becomes _two cycles ago_ or even _a week_ or, stars forbid, _a year ago_ , and maybe he'll keep existing after the bloody ground of Crait is painted over again with white salt and he will return back to ~~_blueblUEBLUE_~~ her home planet and remember her beginnings as he mourns her end.

 

Maybe.

 

Just maybe.

 

He doesn't know when the concept of maybe started to feel like a sentence worse than death given by the impartial, stone-faced judge of language.

 

The lift slides to a halt and the harsh taunting of the elusive maybe haunts him as he steps out, something dark and sharp drying under his tongue and making his mouth taste bitter and hollow, like the tea he had shared with a being of ~~_blueblueblue_~~ one ancient, distant, meaningless day before he became a true and perfectly wretched abomination, before he was more than the icon of mass genocide, the face of an organization that is made from nothing but corpses masquerading as beings, the poster child of atrocities as he spit out a speech that wrenched something deep inside of him out to, hissing, herald the ~~_REDREDRED_~~ of one of Temaht's ancient sons writhing up from beneath the surface of a planet to greet the void with the shrieking of screaming, silenced voices.

 

The air feels different. Not literally, there isn't any whiff of a possible toxin in the air, no distinct taste, and it doesn't feel any thicker or faster against his skin. Mentally, though, there is something darker to it, something bleeding black oil in its conflict, something that feels as young and vicious as him.

 

Behind him, the lift closes and shoots back down to ferry more beings, more countless, nameless people he will never be able to look in the eye or call by name, not only because he doesn't care, but because he will never see them. They'll be shipped out elsewhere, or die in the repairs or from incidents while evaluating, or will do any of the many things he's thought about to themselves than sooner serve under a boy king where there used to be someone anonymously terrifying and horrifyingly efficient, or simply remain as the ghostlike cogs in the grand machine to him.

 

Before him, the boy king stands in front of an open door.

 

He looks like some sick parody of the Crow Daughter, all feathery black hair and star-pale skin, and for a second, Hux can picture him with red laurels in his hair, in the way of the Warmongers of old, with _akoz_ leaves weaved into crowns on their heads, making them disciples of the god of change. He can see him, lain out against a pool of red, black hair dancing out in a fractured halo, dark eyes staring out glassily and dead, to be picked up from an anonymous battlefield and burned on a pyre in the way of the stars.

 

He could watch this man die. He could try right now, and inevitably go out any of the first ways he thought of on his way up, because no matter what way he tried, with the certainty he knows liars, he would fail.

 

And he could do something so much more antithetical to his being than the simple grace of death.

 

He could watch this man live. Watch him fold and break under the weight of a nonexistent but even heavier crown, or watch him lead with the horrified fascination of a scientist whose experiment has gone just a bit too far.

 

He would like that, oh yes, he would. To watch this boy (L o n g L i v e.) struggle to hold himself and a regime together. It would be utterly hilarious to watch him try to have an orderly crash and burn, to stamp out the ashes that remained of a ruler. Hux has been burning to the ground for as long as he's been alive, but he knows the difference between a controlled burn and the rampaging wildfires that would and will consume the soul of this impostor of a messiah.

 

He does not see the Talemaker Of The Gods in him anymore. Does not look at him and see something almost beautiful in its heresy.

 

He sees a child playing dress up as a plaything of the gods.

 

Ren turns to face him, with the sudden, sharp grace of a startled Ikopi, and Hux says nothing. He will not die today, not now. He will not dare to anymore, not when he can watch his tormentor collapse from the inside out like his greatest achievement did. Not when _BLUEBLUEBLUE_ 's killer remains loose and free and the Resistance still lives, rebirthing itself in the hearts of the artificial nova of Hosnian's destruction like the starbird it so proudly calls its symbol.

 

He says nothing as he walks to his own door and types in a passcode he will be sure to change later.

 

He turns back from within his quarters to close the door and finds his eyes locking with Ren's. They're a strange color, something so deep it's almost black. Most likely it's brown, but they could be anything, dark and broken and conflicted.

 

He will speak with Ren again, he knows, but after this wretched, endless day is done. He is determined to be the darker of the two when they meet again, and not this volatile mess he is now.

 

The door closes sharply, but Hux does not miss Ren's flinch before it finishes.

 

Time stretches onwards as something waits, poised on the edge of his consciousness. The soundproofing in this room makes it impossible to tell when Ren leaves, but he can feel the heaviness in the air disappearing, taking with it the last restraint on the thing in his head.

 

Hux falls against the door, and laughs like the stars have fallen from the sky. He laughs and laughs and laughs like there are no voids anymore, like he will greet the oceans again tomorrow, like the tradewinds of the starways will make him into an oblivion rather than this painfully mortal thing he exists as.

 

He laughs and laughs and all he can think of is something someone faceless and nameless had said to him once as he watched a suspected rebel agent get airlocked.

 

(“No one can hear you scream in space, ya' know? No medium for sound, and all that. But you can hear yourself scream. You can scream and scream if you even have the air and no one will hear ya' but yourself. It'll go through bone and skin an' everything. My da' said that if you use your last breaths in space to swear somethin' no one else will ever hear, it becomes part of you. Creepy, that.”)

 

He can feel it tremble through him, feel it start where his torso is sore and burning from impact with the bulkhead, clawing its way up through his throat to where it's raw and broken, can feel it jar his jaw and push its way past his lips, entering the air as if to spend its brief life wreaking as much echoing havoc as it can as it drills through his mind.

 

Is this what madness feels like? Is this what it is to well and truly lose your mind, this abrupt leap off the ledge of pseudo-sanity and into a roiling sea where he doesn't know how to swim? Is this where Armitage Hux will end and General Starkiller will well and truly take over? Is this how men less broken than he become the monster he already is?

 

No.

 

Is this all that will be left of the legacy of some bright-eyed, bastard child of a woman who loved him enough to leave him the blessings of the stars in a recording? Some laughing, hollow corpse of a being that bleeds _rEdReDREd_ starlight?

 

He refuses.

 

He will not become something subhuman, will not fall to a graceless and honorless form of madness, refuses to die a quiet death of the spirit locked in his rooms, to be found later by someone unfortunate enough to walk in on an abomination defending its nest.

 

No, this is not the way. Balance between pure conflict and serenity, that is the madness he seeks, the kind that runs through his veins on a daily basis. He dreams to be a contradiction, to exist between the stars and walk among them as brethren, to be a heretic god of atrocities and efficiency, to dream up a thousand new ways to die in all the small ways he can until he has made the galaxy anew with this new, horrendous concept of equilibrium.

 

When the Great Night comes with silver and _BLUEBLUEBLUE_ oceans to guide him away from the pointless, distasteful corpse he has made, he will follow it with his sanity intact. The starless darkness will take it from him in suffocating, breathless waves, and he will smile and fall into the Oblivion. He will breathe and break and scream into the void and he alone will hear it until he is a Nothing that was once a Something.

 

He will swear an oath of loyalty to the forgotten, broken stars that beg to die and it will become his bones.

 

Until then, it is his responsibility as a star-child to breathe in madness and blood and exhale ash and fire, it is his duty to refine the delirium of the stars into something palatable for non-believers, to make the unspeakable into actions and words one can say.

 

It is the only thing he was born to do, and he will do it until he is nothing but _REDREDRED_ and broken edges.

 

And so he stands, like a shambling corpse coming back to life, like some undead horror taking in wheezing breaths with a gaping emptiness where a heart should be, and breathes.

 

Breathes for the ones who can't anymore. For the sacrifices and martyrdoms and warriors and dishonorables. For Phasma. For Hosnian. For gods of the stars.

 

Breathes, and forgets the blasphemy that lurks under his skin, that calls itself General Starkiller as if it has earned the moniker of a deity.

 

Breathes in. Breathes out.

 

Remembers. Forgets.

 

Breathes.

 

He has work to do.

 

 

 

It is written that those without sight were once the luckiest creatures.

 

Some tales say that in Elsma'en's rage at Akozé's flight, she cursed those with the sight that had apparently blinded them to stare forever, searching for her light, that eyes were sacred things that were never to be touched by predators, else they be condemned. That she swore a breathless oath on the stars and it became her bond.

 

Some say it was always the way. Some say that Temaht met Elsma'en before the Red Sister first met the Star Sister, and that eyes were made on a lost wager to the Red God, so that others may watch those around them decay.

 

Some say many things, and sometimes no one listens. That too, is a way of the world. It's best not to dwell.

 

Regardless, so it came to be, that after the rest of their forms had been taken by Mother Nature's nurture, their eyes would remain and stare towards the sky, waiting to catch another sightless glimpse of Elsma'en's light, though they'd gone blind in life searching for it already.

 

It is said that one day, as Akozé flew, she looked to the ground for kernels of truth to shape into lessons for her Master's people, and saw a field of a thousand eyes looking back at her without sight, reflecting her great black form back, and she halted her search to land among the Sightless Seers.

 

“Oh, this is not the way!” She declared, and took flight again to meet with her Master.

 

She flew across the voids, and at every planet she landed on in search of the black and white of her Red God, she would find eyes affixed to her wings, and would call out her displeasure to the stars, to call Elsma'en's children to watch the Watchers and see what great wrongs have been commited.

 

When she found her Master she alighted on his shoulder and whispered of the wrongs into his ear and he frowned and followed her as Brother Raven, chased with her along the stars to find a field of unseeing eyes again.

 

“Oh, my Child-Sister...” He murmured as he stared down at the field, roosting in an _akoz_ with her as they watched the field of sightless, empty silver with their beady black, “Amends must be made. Come, my Talemaker, and let us greet my Sister-Fool.”

 

And so they flew in search of Elsma'en in all her scorching, scourging light that blinded her children that didn't already live under darkness, and they could not find her.

 

Instead, they found a nameless child, being taken apart by a pack of hungry beasts that were never taught anything, and without the constant guidance of their Creator, forgot that those that walked and flew and swam among them were their ancient kin.

 

“My God-above-light,” Akozé begged, “Let me take those innocent things back to my nest, so they may see the workings of the gods and the worlds of the future, rather than stay searching for a light they will lose themselves to.”

 

And Temaht flew down to hold a vigil, and took one of the eyes that remained and gave it gently to Akozé, to carry in one claw back to her nest in the spaces between words spoken, as he took the other one with her and flew until she met with another mortal that allowed her safe passage back.

 

And then she returned, and they carried on their search.

 

A day they flew, and stopped to rest their wings and their minds, when Akozé came upon another dead being, staring at a sky, and Temaht only gave her a bow of his head in approval before she flew down to take the eyes and bring them back to her nest, in all of their silver, shiny, glassy beauty.

 

It's said this is why Akozé and all of her minion-sibling-forms searches for the shiniest of things, for they appear much like her first proper hunt.

 

They flew more, and every day when they stopped to roost they would find, without fail, another pair of eyes, and Akozé would take them until her nest was full of them, and she could no longer find any room.

 

Temaht listened to her predicament and the next day, when they came upon the next corpse, he hopped down and swallowed one of the eyes, and Akozé balked.

 

“Oh great Master,” She said, as she flew down to meet with him better, “Is it not the Blue Goddess' word that we not touch them, for they gaze upon her light? If we harm them, we are surely forsaken.”

 

And Temaht laughed like all that follow his form do and spoke, “Akozé, my Red Child-Sister, we are already damned in her eyes, and we will not be redeemed, as her first betrayers. The only thing we can do is end the suffering of her people.” And he nudged the next toward her and her black wings, the massive things that could consume whole planets in darkness when fully unfurled, easily wrapping around any form easily, to pull them into her endless dreams, “They have seen many things we will not, have heard many stories that your people make, it is a waste to let their words die like this crude matter.”

 

And so Akozé did as her Master said, and learned of the things this Child of her Father-Brother's Sister had seen, and grew wiser for it.

 

They flew. And she learned, and learned, as a deity learns from mortals, of the terror of death, and of true fear, and all the emotions she has not felt.

 

Until one day, they came across an old being, hunched over on a staff, reciting strange words over the fallen bodies, and Akozé flew down and turned into a different form to ask where she had learned such words, for she had not heard them, though she was the maker of mortal tongues.

 

“They are what I have spoken over every one of my fallen brethren,” the being replied, “They are not words, they are symbols. Symbols of what I have learned through each of the Red God's trials, that have made me wiser for it.”

 

And Akozé, in the form of a child, said, “Teach me.” And so she learned. For, through Elsma'en's careful cycles of scrutiny and neglect, rarely was there any old creature allowed to learn wisdom of their own.

 

Before she left with Temaht who watched his first and most crucial follower, she turned back to a crow and gave the woman marks of her claws that had once carried the blind sight of her brethen on either side of her eyes and told her to close the eyes of the fallen, so that she might know where they were to be found, and could chase the darkness to gain the knowledge of the mortals the she sustained herself upon.

 

It is said that for every being that remains alive long enough, Akozé gifts them with her crow's feet, so they will not forget the wisdom they have gained.

 

It is said after a year had passed, and they could not find Elsma'en's light, Akozé flew into the stars and said to her Master, “I do not think we will need to find your Sister, my Kin-God, for there is nothing she would do any better than has already been done. Let the damned be damned, and I will take Sight with my wings, and mark wisdom with my claws. Let us fly apart for now, until we may find each other again.”

 

And so they parted, and Akozé sang stories with the same beak she plucked out eyes with, and marked the old with the same claws she had taken other's sight back to her nest, and she had found a great purpose.

 

This isn't so much a lesson, but a story. You may take whatever lesson you want out of it, though. Hardly my position to stop you.

 

There are variations beyond count, too many to even name, of how sight came to be. Too many, and the night will grow dark before I can even name any meaningful fraction.

 

But watch, and look, and listen, and feel, and you will know that Akozé will someday know you as well as you know yourself, if not much better.

 

Listen to these tales and you will learn.

 

 

 

He takes the pointless luxury of a water shower, and then stands, shivering (He should get back into his layers, ships were always so kriffing cold, but there's something comforting about being as physically cold as he is spiritually.) until the light fog of steam flees from the mirror. He traces maps of ugly purple and green and black on his sides, like some grand atlas of an undiscovered planet, a single continent surrounded by and ocean of rippled, lightly scarred skin. His fingers linger on the delicate collar around his throat that's such a uniform ring of purple it seems almost like a fashion statement rather than something that makes every damn breath (Remember. Forget.) burn.

 

He lingers over a few older, yellowish ones, mostly healed where they paint themselves against his skin, and thinks of Phasma, locking eyes as _blueblueblue_ as Elsma'en's star with his. She isn't here to do it for him, so he looks into his own eyes, their brackish blue-green-gray that looks nothing like hers, and tells himself this is what he deserves as he presses onto the wild, stretching blueprint of bruising on his body (It's almost the same color as the stuff he and four other Cadets had planned Starkiller on. By the time they were to present it to High Command, only Hux and one other boy with a terminal disease he didn't know about lurking under his skin were left alive to present it. He will neither confirm nor deny that he was at every single scene of the crime prior to their deaths.).

 

It burns, it aches, and he stares into the glassy, pond-like eyes and they stare back at him like a stranger's (Like the dark-maybe-brown in the hall, like the dead blue that might still be slowly rotting in a room that used to be swathed in scarlet).

 

He's alarmed to find that he fears these eyes far more than any others he's encountered so far.

 

Slowly, with a shuddering breath that feels too much like he is about to remember again, he takes his hand back away, and stares back at the mirror, gripping the sides of the sink and forcing himself to look at those horrible, fearful things in the reflection staring back at him.

 

The tales of the senses had always been long, because they were more sacred than the ever-dying gods. They were the edicts of unshakeable creation, and they had a tendency to bleed into every legend of the gods.

 

He didn't get to watch _blueblueblue_ 's eyes gain Akozé's footprints, he realizes now, didn't get to see her grow streaks of silver in her gold, wasn't allowed to be by her side when her Great Night came for her, was only allowed whatever bastardized form of a vigil he had held over a corpse that still smelled like ash and burnt creation, could only look at the pit where Akozé had already performed her duty and made her blind so she would not look back on the plane of existence and pity.

 

All he could do was look at the gods' work and scream in the ceaseless void in his chest.

 

All he could do was look at the twice fallen angel from a higher hell than hers.

 

All he can do is bleed.

 

He's bleeding right now, he realizes, and he has the echo of something shattering in his ears, ~~redredred~~ running down his right knuckles, broken shards of mirror clinging stubbornly to their frame and tinkling in a delicate pile in the sink.

 

Maybe he should be more concerned with that than he is, but instead he stares down at the little monument of destruction he's built in the metal crucible below, and sees his fractured eyes reflected back a thousand times over, crazed horrif(ying/ied) things.

 

He looks like more of a monster than ever before, an eldritch abomination with a thousand screaming mouths and a thousand burning, broken eyes. Like something out of some horrible mythos that he doesn't subscribe to, like some grand adversary or vengeful god that can hold no shape but the indescribable summation of every fear in the most horrid and simultaneous of ways.

 

Fractured. Broken. Shattered. Disintegrated.

 

He is heart-wrenchingly disgusting.

 

He leaves the fresher without releasing the scream he aches to, that his chest burns with, because some horrible truth burns in him that if he did now, he would never stop until he had run out of air and not stop then until he is cold and dead on the floor, waiting for the Great Night to come for him and for Akozé to steal his eyes away into her nest of a billion tales.

 

Whatever variation of his pants he's put on, it's hardly a type he would like to wear onto a battlefront, which would probably be less dangerous than the current encounter he's careening towards, unerringly certainly. The shirt, meanwhile, is one he recognizes from the very back of his closet, an old, coarse, rough sweater, hanging on his form, that he'd taken from his true-mother, the same ~~redredred~~ as her halo on the floor. It drags over his bruises uncomfortably, loose enough that it always returns to go over the same spot with every slight swaying movement, hanging pitifully off one shoulder blooming with bruising, leaving bare the ring of mottling purple in a perfect ring that makes it seem so much less natural than a hand, more like a collar marking him as property, as a _rabid cur_ than anything else.

 

There's still a bead of blood dripping slowly down, carving a path down the back of his palm and falling into the fabric, leaving behind a trail of ~~redredred~~ that disappears from sight once he shakes the sleeves over his hands to hide the pulsing signs of his weakness.

 

He takes a moment to spare a thought for whatever poor crew member was tasked with carrying his wardrobe from his quarters on the Finalizer to here in the crushing chaos, before reaching into a cabinet and pulling out a decanter of something he doesn't even remember the name of. The elaborate glass cork makes a sound that would be alarming if he cared when he tosses it carelessly back onto the counter, and he doesn't bother to go searching for a glass.

 

He won't have anyone to share it with, anyway. Won't have anyone to hand a glass to and feel something bizarrely satisfied jump up within him, some ridiculous, whimsical thought about having a tea party with some deadly creature from a beyond, with eyes like burning ~~blueBLUEblue~~ unknowns.

 

He doesn't hesitate, doesn't give himself a moment to reconsider, to smell whatever disgusting near-poisonous fumes are rising from the lip of the bottle, just takes the whole damn thing and downs as much as he can in one go.

 

It burns like acid and fire down his throat, and he welcomes it as a destroyer of whatever monster sits here now, blood running down palms and into ~~redredRED~~ caverns that swallow up light and pale limbs and burn soothing rhythms against blueprints to a new destroying creation, with the thousand eyes of some great Elder God that lurks in the Great Beyond.

 

It tastes even worse than it smells, makes his terrif(ying/ied) pits of poisoned steel water, knocks the memories of ~~BluebLUeBLUe~~ out of his head for a precious, singular moment, gives him something more to think about than the smell of Keneloe and a burning need for vengeance.

 

He takes another swig.

 

After the fourth, it stops tasting as bad as it had before.

 

By the time the entire decanter is gone, he's sunk to the floor in front of the counter and is just staring at the glass container like it will do something more, will twist into a bird and fly away, will turn into Akozé and lead him off into a blissful, maddening oblivion, will magically fill again until thought means absolutely nothing anymore and he'll stop bleeding red and will bleed thought into the room until he suffocates in them, drowns in the flood of formless concepts and meaningless words.

 

He looks up, and between him and the overly-generous bed, there is a ghost.

 

It wears white and black, silver and chrome dancing on hems and stretching in sharp, technical lines, skin star-pale from time spent staring out from expressionless black pits, blank, empty holes where eyes should be, a starburst of scarred flesh over the left emptiness.

 

“You're not real.” He whispers, but it sounds monumental to his ears, echoing strangely in this silent dimension he has entered, where the hum of the ship is nonexistent and his own breath is too loud.

 

It tilts its head in the birdlike way that always sang legends to him, that always made him feel undeniably safe, even as electricity crawled closer and closer still, and calloused hands pressed against cuts and contusions.

 

“You're not.” He asserts, slightly louder, and it sounds like something cataclysmic as the walls seem to bleed to blank voids that leave only him and a ghost.

 

It smiles, in the savage way that would be hidden except for when a corpse regaled him with tales from the battlefront, that would make him transfix on the sharp teeth that had torn flesh from bone as laughter filled the room with a million lost souls' voices.

 

“You can't be real.” it's a hoarse statement, an almost desperate statement, like language itself is being flayed to the bones, and these are it's last remaining words.

 

A tilt. A smile. “Are you real?” She speaks with the biting sarcasm she has always held close as one of her thousand small rebellions, but there is no breath to her words, none of the painful rhythm that rages against his ears, that births itself in his chest and pushes itself past the collar that presses against his windpipe.

 

A Talekind to the last, to speak questions even without breath.

 

It chokes him more surely than any boy king ever could. “Phasma.” And that's less than a whisper, less than the thoughts spilling dark oil and redredred against the floor, less than nothing, but he knows that she hears in this place where sound suffers a slow, consuming death to the million echoes.

 

“It's alright to cry, Armitage.” The word slips with the smoky accent she never quite got rid of, that drew out words into twisted, sharp remakings of themselves, like she turned language itself into a new weapon. There's no vocoder now, to keep it trim and sharp and put together in the ways that everyone would expect but no one bothers to look through to see the lie. She speaks his first name, that he despises when said in any other voice, and he obeys.

 

He gasps in with a shuddering breath, head swimming and nose filling up with the scent of liquor and Crait, tasting the edge of salt as little drops of water carve messy crevices and bleeding ravines in with the time of a thousand years, shedding away rock and steel with the persistent currents of this deep, savage, betraying emotion that rises up within the deep crevices that not even the most deadly of beasts dares to swim.

 

There's a sigh with no breath, and then the ghost moves forward and folds down smoothly against the bed in a mirror of his pose, knees pulled up halfheartedly. With an abrupt suddenness, the surreal mysticism of the scenario is broken, and it feels like just another Primeday, both of them sitting quietly and wondering how long it would take for the Order to implode if they one day put a blaster to their heads and pulled the trigger, veiled over with conversation about their favorite underlings(successors) and what they planned to do in the next campaign.

 

She is different though, and it is not the same. Her eyes are not there to stare him down while he talked, her clothing hardly something she would want to wear into battle, the room around them a black void, no sounds from the ship while they wait in silence, she is not breathing, and he is breathing too irregularly, half sobbing, all of it echoing back on him as if proving how disgusting of a creature he is, to be able to mourn for a fellow monster and not feel a damn thing for Hosnian.

 

“I always did wonder how I would die.” It echoes, but it isn't prefaced by a breath, and his throat doesn't burn any more than usual, so it must've been her that spoke. It's worrying that he doesn't quite know the difference.

 

“Not like this?” he manages, angrily swiping the rough fabric over his face in a wash of redredred.

 

A small, bitter laugh with nothing but silence bracketing it, enfolding over it after it's gone like it never even existed. “Not exactly like that. But I've thought of it before, it's hardly the first scenario of a well-placed subordinate taking out a person in po-”

 

“Stop talking like you're like them.” It burst out before he can stop it, but he feels the twisted, personal truth to his statement writhing up to greet this void between them. “You're not. You're not like the other leaders, you're an infinite person, I swear I-”

 

“Stop kidding yourself, Armitage.” Her voice is sharp now, losing some of the silk she picked up, the lazy tilt of her words tightening into a dangerous entity, “I am the same as every other being in power, maybe worse, hardly better.” This laugh echoes harshly, spilling against the black void of his thoughts that litter the ground, “I am the same as any of the lives in Hosnian. I left behind billions who will mourn me on principle and only a few who will mourn me for existing rather than dying.” Another tilt of the head that's as condemning as her words, “Sometimes people are only remembered because they died, General, because sometimes that's all anyone will ever care to remember.”

 

 _General_. Not Armitage. Not _vod_. Not Hux.

 

_General._

 

“Don't call me that.” How many times has he said the same thing to people who dare to use his first name, the name bequeathed upon him by a monster that had bled so perfectly when it died that he'd almost wanted to enshrine the moment, as light faded and a crow laughed in the distance.

 

She laughs as cruelly as ever.

 

“ _Don't_.”

 

“And why not? It's your title isn't it, your last vestige of peace.” The word is said like it burns her tongue, like she wants it out and gone and obliterated. “It's the only thing that you ever made truly _yours_.”

 

“It's not yours to use.” It's not, it's not. She holds the other three syllables that the title had hidden captive beneath her tongue, held behind fangs and poison.

 

It's a bitter thing that claws out of her mouth this time, and there's a tiny trickle of blood that runs down the side of her mouth, but then it's gone and she's smiling. “And why's that, _sir_?”

 

“YOU'RE NOT THEM.”

 

“Why? Why am I not them, what makes me so different?”

 

“You're a monster like me. We're made to lurk under beds and scare children. We're not meant to have a happy ending.”

 

“Oh, you are a fool, aren't you?” There's no laugh, and the eerie silence makes his heart feel like it's going to beat the whole galaxy deaf. “Open your eyes, brother-mine,” The voids set on her face mock him as surely as the one out the window behind her head, “Are you blind to the den you rule? These aren't mice, and they aren't men, _no_. This is the festering hole of monsters, and they bow to you and the boy-king. They may not be named, but they kill the same as you.”

 

“It-It's not the same.”

 

“Oh, do tell _how._ Is it because I helped kill your father? I was your willing accomplice, is that it? Your partner in patricide and all other ensuing crimes? Is that it?” Again, the silence burns and boils against him. “Every person on this hellhole of a ship is your partner in a system-scale genocide, and _all other ensuing crimes_. I'd dare to say they're bigger monsters than even me.”

 

“You said we would build a legacy! That we would be legends, that togethe-” His voice breaks on the cursed word and he doesn't even bother to finish his sentence, “And now you can't build it anymore.”

 

“I never meant to build it. I did my part.” His head snaps up quickly enough that there's that brief white hot flash of pain, and she opens her mouth in a silent gasp, like she's in pain or is breathing in his into empty lungs, “I'm a faceless Captain in fancy armor. I'm more like a droid than any sentient. I'm memorable to the extent that I'm forgettable. You, though? You have a legacy to protect and build from while you obliterate it yourself. You don't wear a helmet and use a vocoder, because you are the monster with a face, while I am the one without one.

 

“I'm the expendable one. I don't have anything but you, you have the entirety of the First Order who will come to your beck and call and burn systems to the ground a thousand times over. I get this oblivion while you obliterate everything else.” A sharp, quick sound, like a laugh or the slightest of sobs, it's hard to know, “I get to be free.”

 

“I'll make them remember you, I'll-”

 

“Don't kill yourself trying to bring me back from the dead. I'll be remembered by everyone I killed, and that's enough for me. Is it nice to know that you'll have such a legacy waiting for you in the Night?”

 

“Wha-”

 

“It hurts, doesn't it? To realize you've made a legacy out of nothing but bodies? That maybe someday you'll just be _Starkiller_ and your life will be inseparable from the monster you made.” She stands, looming over him, lips twisted in a sneer, empty sockets glaring down impassively without the fires he is used to seeing, “That in the end all you'll accomplish will be a body count and some lonely stars, a name buried in records tossed aside for more interesting figures, that all you've built will amount to nothing but destruction and irrelevance.”

 

“Shut up.” A plea.

 

“No, _listen_ , _General_. Someday you will die and join me and know that everyone is forgetting you even as you lose your mind, and you will not feel _anything_. Some distant, lonely day, you will look back on this and you _will not care_. So go ahead, then. _Feel_.” She spits it like a dirty word, “Let the damn things consume you and then lock them back up if that's what you need to feel less like a human than whatever disgusting breed of thing you are now.”

 

“Shut _up_.” An order.

 

“You will be nothing all over again. You will be a drop of blood in a massacre, another grain on Jakku, you will be singular and indistinguishable and you _will not feel a damn thing_.” It's said with relish, like she's declaring the death of her enemy as she stands over their corpse, “It's the living's job to feel. You mourn and we burn, you burn down bridges and we greet a morning we can't see. It's your destiny to feel, your fate to know the deepest possible cruelty of mortality-”

 

“ _Shut. Up._ ” A roar.

 

“-that you will always chase closure for us lucky few that have found peace. But it's a privilege you will not have when you are the oblivion, so _damn it Hux-_ ”

 

“SHUT UP!”

 

“ _FEEL!_ ”

 

A shattering.

 

The decanter that was once in his hands now lays scattered in pieces over the carpet from where it impacted with the solid base of the bed.

 

Phasma is not there.

 

Maybe she never was.

 

He can distantly hear his datapad chiming, along with the sudden, startling reappearance of all of the ambient sounds of the ship, the pounding, humming tempo in his head that hazes over thought with the ruthless, searching fingers of a subconscious trying to drag up blueblueblue back from the dead.

 

Yes, maybe tomorrow he will be back to being a monster. Tomorrow when he walks across metal, he will be indistinguishable from the shadows and steel he stands upon, will wear black and white in the mourning of the goddess of war and will blaze like something within him has forgotten how to be mortal.

 

For now, though.

 

For now he will be human.

 

The scream that writhes up his throat tastes like blood and freedom and weakness and the edge of the rebellion that made war gospel.

 

For now he will feel.

 

And he will bleed it like Temaht's red, like a true son of the stars, like the leaves of the _akoz_ his bastard-bearing mother had given birth to him under.

 

For now he will forget how to breath.

 

The voids between stars holds no air, and gods and their champions had flown there anyway, between the stars in black and white, with silver and red in their claws.

 

Only for now.

 

Tomorrow promises monsters.

 

 

 

Once upon a time, there was a revolution.

 

Before war was truly created as more than just a title of the Red God, it was rebellion that beasts knew.

 

It swept across an entire planet and drew every being to its cause, a great revolt of every being, from the smallest of creatures to the most mighty all leapt to join the cause. They all chanted together in chorus, shatuals next to strills, unafraid and standing mighty together. They rallied other planets to their grand insurgency, called upon every being to fight beside them, and they all answered the call.

 

Only then, they realized they did not have something to fight against, and so they turned to old tales, to forgotten words and messages and the ghosts of the ones that came before them, to find some great enemy to put their massive, combined hopeful hatred against. They scoured caves and made language to convey what they knew of the great Adversary.

 

Slowly, as the search turned up no great evil, they looked to the two Parent-Stars and thought up more tales.

 

They thought up tales of Elsma'en casting planets away from her light for the slightest of sleights, as it is said she did to Akozé's home world, but not before her trees spread their roots into the Beyond itself. They thought up tales of Temaht cutting people and planets and stars down without hesitation, on a whim.

 

They thought up stories, and they grew to fear.

 

And Elsma'en looked down onto her own creations that trembled before her great Light, and felt their fear run through her plasma. “I sense my False-Brother's hand in this,” She muttered to the void, “He must pay for this insolence.” And she left to find Temaht.

 

She crossed a hundred voids in search, went to many planets where they all trembled to see her, and felt her anger rise for her companion in astral form, her immortal enemy, clothed in red.

 

Sixty-five days and sixty-five nights, by her own star against her prized jewels, she traveled, in search for answers.

 

When the Sixty-sixth day dawned, she saw him, in his black and white garb, frowning over a trembling people, and felt her stewing anger bubble.

 

“Temaht, oh Traitor to my Word, what sorcery have you worked over my people, you Fool of Conflict! They run, afraid, from my Light, only you could have done this!” The creatures below trembled all the more, but she did not notice, for all she cared for was her Not-Kin before her who had violated her laws. “I demand retribution!”

 

“Elsma'en, oh Sister to my Being, you cannot blame me for this, for I thought that it was you who made these stories, to rival my Talemaker's power.” He laughed and it bled into the air like poison into a water supply. “This was not my doing, Brethren Mine, so it must be yours.”

 

Elsma'en laughed like church bells, but they tolled unlike hers usually did, “Oh, you Grand Liar, you tell nothing but falsehoods. This fear could only be your doing, for emotion is not my domain, and I know I did not cause it!”

 

Temaht grew confused, for he could not make sense of this, “Then one of us must be a liar, but I know it is not me. Though emotion is my domain, I did not create this, for creation is yours, and they did not fear you. I may only influence that which you create, and I know this was not my manipulation.”

 

Elsma'en grew even more foul in mood, as she always did when confronted with the beacons of conflict Temaht and his Crow Daughter were, as she was unused to feeling anything but serenity and apathy, and was unskilled in controlling herself. “Then the liar is you, for I am not at fault!”

 

Temaht became frustrated, “Then you are twice the liar, for claiming me to be the one who tells untrue words.”

 

Elsma'en howled like her creations were born to do and looked at him, “Then you are thrice the liar! Sixty-five days and nights have I searched for you, for answers as to why you would harm my creatures, and yet I find nothing but a lying fool! Tell me true now, or know that your Justice goes unserved, you miserable Deity of Scraps!”

 

And Temaht hissed like the predators that had yet to learn hunting, “And twice for us both, have you lied! Four times have you spit truths you have never made to me, and yet you talk of my Justice!” He laughed harshly, and it broke through the air like the screams of the young and the pounding of explosions that warfare brought, “For one who claims to be the One True God, you commit heresy with _such_ ease.”

 

“Enough!” Elsma'en finally barked, and she intoned her next words with the edge of unshakeable prophecy, “Then let it be Made that this is the natural state of all creatures, to Fear and Fight that which they cannot truly understand! Let it be Written that the liars will always Fight among themselves over their untruths, and let it be Known that the true Enemy is the one that has made this Revolution!”

 

And below, brother turned against brother, for Fear and for Fury, and finally Knowing their Enemy, began to shed the blood of family.

 

And Temaht laughed, for the goddess had influenced her own creations to be his. He laughed, for she had condemned her loyal on behalf of her disloyal, and had given him more followers than he ever could have made.

 

“Oh, foolish Sister-Mine,” He breathed, as he felt conflict boil up in every corner of the galaxy, “Now you have condemned yourself.” He smiled with sharpness as predators learned to hunt prey, “Now, for every creation, there must be conflict and chaos, for it was your creations that have made this fear in themselves, and now you have made it theirs eternally, and I their true deity as their natural state.” He kissed her head as she stared over what she had made, and walked away to sow the seeds of war among a willing people, an unapologetic apology dogging on his footsteps.

 

Slowly, the people split into three factions, two hesitant rivals at first and then bitter enemies, one thinking the Talemaker's Teacher to be their Champion, the other thinking the Great Creator to be their Master, the third simply fearing both of the others.

 

Light and Dark, they called themselves, and from that day forward, there was (NopeaceonlypassionNoemotiononlypeace) conflict in the galaxy.

 

If there is a lesson, the gods have obscured it. The only thing you can remember is that Darkness has always been founded in the Light, and that Darkness has always laughed as it wins by grace of not sacrificing all it has believed in.

 

There are only a few variations of this tale. Some say Temaht knew, and goaded Elsma'en to it. Some say Temaht stayed on that planet as brother killed brother killed friend killed mother and watched Elsma'en's creation burn down with her still watching, empty-eyed. Some say this is when Elsma'en swore a vow of vengeance.

 

Feel the anger of the predator rise, and the fear of the prey spike, and it will show that her vow has never been broken in the many generation to come, though she tried to take back her oath.

 

Listen to these tales and you will learn.

 

 

 

Dreams fly past in hazy streaks like dust and fire, shrieks of _letthepastdiekillit/me_ and choked off sound, of screaming in space and hearing only yourself. Of a crow standing on a bone white limb and stealing his eyes, of a black and red and white god stealing away peace without meaning to, of bright blue igniting until it burned itself to ash.

 

Bitterness on his tongue, poison and death and a killing blow, the rising sun, the wretched tomorrow dawning against the sky with two suns destroying each other. Of glassy blue and red and black feathers, of dead gods and none but their priests to practice their horrible miracles.

 

Stars in the hands of beings who will crush them with stolen divinity, mortals who name themselves gods and rise until they fly. Summertime horrors birthing themselves under sunlight until there is nothing but their blinding light and those too imperfect to be their miniature suns lay six feet under, side by side.

 

Feathers in the void, glimmering with dark blue light, decaying with a sharp, precise slowness that makes every moment a drawn out eon of agony. Fire burning and consuming, eating alive, eating the dead, eating it all until there is nothing but ashes and hunger. Silver reflecting from down a long tunnel, judgmental pits of darkness staring balefully out in blind condemnation.

 

Pale fingers tightening around a blaster's trigger, _inoutinoutnothoughtbutbreathandblood_ , staring down the scope at the face he knows because it used to be blueblueblue's division, used to be hers and then came back with flame in hand and took the features of the mother into molten history. Blood spray, screaming, death and destruction and mayhem and the pressing, unnatural feeling of what others call the Force.

 

A hand around a neck, darkness, expecting to see brown and blue staring out in hateful combination, both of his torturers with their scars and their horrible mystery. Instead there is flame red and poisoned steel, calculating and cold and broken.

 

There are pills and shaking hands, the cold press of a blaster and sharp breaths, ice against a wrist and a high whining. There is a sunrise on a thousand planets, staring out over the abyss like something other than chaos rules its folds, black and red and white and prayers to gods that have long since abandoned and died.

 

There is balance in this chaos. Symmetry in the dead and the living.

 

A horrid harmony.

 

Beautiful.

 

He wakes.

 

It's dark in his room, blessedly. Drunk Hux was apparently kind enough to turn them off before he passed out, and had the foresight to place a massive bowl that probably contained ornamental fruit on the floor next to the bed.

 

Drunk Hux had enough foresight to do many things, including ordering a hangover shot from the medbay and starting the bare bones of a better sorting algorithm for his files. He remembers all of it, of course, the actions if not the thoughts that came behind them. That's always been the most satisfying thing about getting drunk enough that by all rights he should be blacked out and forgetting everything that happened. He remembers all the things he did, all the demons he faced, without having to actually remember whatever horrible things he had to come to terms with before he reached his conclusions.

 

He drinks to forget, in a way. Less for the absence of thought and memory and more to retain efficiency. Less to run from his monsters and more to become the beast itself and only come back to being mortal once his stomach is full of dead.

 

He wants it to end, in all the ways he can think of off the top of his head, wants to spend every damn day of his life drinking himself into thoughtless, cold, mechanical submission, wants to down caff and stims until he dies without feeling, ice and efficiency, dead weight cast out into space, no hero's funeral.

 

He will never get a hero's funeral. If he does it will be a sham and everyone in attendance will know it.

 

But he can't die today. He cannot die until he is done with everything he needs to do, because if he does then blueblueblue will destroy him with claws and then piece him back together lovingly for the sake of that and that alone.

 

He cannot throw himself out like he is so much garbage. He has work to do, has superiors to keep in check and subordinates to destroy slowly and/or toss out of airlocks.

 

He has work.

 

Still, he finds himself in the bathroom, staring down at the shards of mirror in the sink, applying bacta cream to the cuts on the back of the hand he used to punch them, not even glancing toward a datapad that is bursting at the seams with notifications. He hasn't bothered to change either, from the sleep rumpled sweater that holds a ghost within its redredred folds.

 

He can feel a battle coming, can practically feel the darkness stirring behind his door, waiting, in what might be meant to be menacing but instead just feels sad. Maybe Ren means to seem like an ever-present shadow, looming just beyond the doorway, ready to ambush whenever the perfectly pressed _General Hux_ emerges from within the confines of ghosts and glass and alcohol. All he does is seem like a bashful teenager, too afraid to ring the damn doorbell.

 

 _Let him come_. Some callous part of him whispers, _Let him see how false every last one of his gods are. Let him see the mortal and let him weep for it._

 

 _No._ Says the other part, more calculated and vicious, _Let him see you and worship you as the new deity. Let him see the blood and scars and grace._

 

Yes, he thinks. He likes both of those.

 

He has a cape somewhere in his closet, he thinks. A light, black and white number with a clasp of the dying star of the First Order surrounded by a crow, for ceremonies. It's not nearly as technical and practical as the rest of his closet, isn't utilitarian and made for the battlefront. It has wings in the back, painted black, fanned out around the sides to look like a laurel crown of old Emperors.

 

It's perfect.

 

It falls deceptively heavy against his shoulders, fanning out around him and pooling when he sits down on the bed where the saw a ghost in the night. The white is stark against the dark red of the sweater, clean and precise against its dirty ghosts, giving no transition of gray before the black pools in, swallowing light perfectly.

 

Tomorrow, he decides, he will acquisition an escape pod of his own and take a model of his old rifle from the armory and leave it there, ready and waiting, barrel glinting in the cold light of stars and florescents. It will stay there as long as it needs to before they encounter FN-2187 again, and only then will it hum to life and take its only shot to kill his murderer friend's murderer.

 

Today he will not care for mortal cares, will play make believe along with Ren, like he is an infinite, infallible god, will wear his fancy clothing, will dress the part and laugh coldly, will pretend he's a god until the other forgets the difference.

 

The door chimes.

 

A smile curls, vicious and dark.

 

 

 

This is how gods die: They kill themselves against their kin.

 

Elsma'en had feared the day would come when her brother would usurp her throne, kill her, and take her place. Dreaded it with all of her being until she became almost sick with it.

 

She would get weaker, she realized. Always and forever, she would die at his hand because he was given such an easy domain to control, to maintain and guard selfishly. His conflict would be his forever, and yet she would be alone.

 

So she made a plan.

 

Their astral forms still remained close together in that forever embrace, never moving much, always right next to one another. If she killed his heart-star, then she would kill him and take his place to live forever.

 

She would just have to kill his star, and only then would she be free of this dread, of this premonition of death. Only then would she be free.

 

Temaht did not know what she planned, until one day he happened upon her as she made her plans in dirt by a river. He called out to her. “Sister of Stars, why do you stray so far from your people? They need your company before they kill every one of themselves.”

 

Elsma'en rose from the riverbank, covered in mud and with the feral look in her eyes of the truly desperate, “How now, Brother of Lies? How dare you come to me in the month of my Triumph and tell me of what true Gods do!” Here she pointed the stick she used to draw at him, “You are a Fool! You are a Usurper! I cast you off!” And then she made the river rise and wash her and her plans away.

 

Temaht worried for her, worried for whatever she planned and picked up her stick, which turned into a blade of light, caught between his and her nature. “My Talemaker.” He called, and Akozé came in a flurry of wings, “Take my sister's creations somewhere safe. I fear she plans something dangerous.”

 

So Akozé went and told sweet tales to the ones that lives on the planets that surrounded their astral forms, told them to fly free beyond the stars, that she would give the first of Elsma'en's people to follow her a stick the goddess herself used, and that those of Temaht's brood should follow her for she brought tidings from the god himself of disaster. The non-believers did not follow her, scoffed at her tales, and the believers left the wings of the Messenger.

 

Elsma'en screamed when she saw that his followers were leaving, that she could not stop them from falling out into the galaxy and birthing conflict like she birthed creation. It was no matter, however. They would be powerless once she was the Only Truth.

 

So she waited in her roost upon her heart-star, waited for the right moment to come, and one day it did.

 

Temaht came in his void-black ways and alighted upon his, and Elsma'en laughed, high and loud, a dangerous sound, like every animal screamed at once in fear. “Hello, Brother of Sins. How nice of you to attend your own funeral!”

 

Temaht whirled around and saw his sister, glowing bright and saturated with her own light, smiling down sharply like the predators of her own creation. “Sister Light, what do you mean? Are you Mad?”

 

And Elsma'en screeched, a horrible, bone-chilling, spirit-breaking sound, that killed itself in the void around them, “You have made me this way, Brother!” She howled, “You have made my Creations into Monsters, and they speak to me in nothing but hisses and growls, they speak of nothing but Death and War!” Her light grew ever brighter, and her heart-star swelled with anger, “You have Corrupted me, and for that, you will Die!”

 

Temaht grew wide-eyed and hopeless, “Sister, this is not your way. Have you lost your Peace? I will help you find it, I swear-”

 

“Enough of your Lies!” She interrupted, and smiled with all of the viciousness her creatures now possessed, “Here you will Die, and none will Mourn! Here I become the Only!”

 

And her heart-star grew until it could almost encompass Temaht's, until it was a thousand to one, until the light overthrew the darkness so thoroughly that Elsma'en could only crow in vicious victory.

 

But then she hunched over herself and clutched at her chest.

 

“No...” She murmured, and Temaht opened his eyes from where he shielded them with his arms, guarding himself from the light however pitifully.

 

“No!” She screamed, as her heart-star began to unravel, pulling itself over Temaht's, spooling out like ink on a page and blood against stone, folding into it until there was nothing but the storm of Elsma'en's own stolen light under neither of their controls and both gods staring at each other in horror.

 

And then she laughed, a high, broken sound.

 

And kept laughing, holding the core of her heart-star in her palm like a marble.

 

“Sister-” Temaht began to speak, horrified.

 

“Foolish. I tried to kill you too late.” Her eyes flashed to his, the same red as his, her hair burning black and then burning to ash and floating away. “I should've killed you in the cradle, Temaht. Now I die instead.”

 

“No-” Temaht denied, and enveloped her in his arms, trying to give her back the life she gave him, freely and unwanted, giving her the stolen grace back. “You will not die today.”

 

And Elsma'en's face shuttered.

 

She raised the fist she held her core in high above her head, her skin glowing with the flickering, broken glow of divinity.

 

“You do not decide what I will do.” She hissed.

 

Her fist tightened.

 

“Starkiller.”

 

And she shattered herself with the power he gave her.

 

Temaht flew back with the force of it, cast away, heart-star and all. And he was never seen again.

 

Some say he still travels the galaxy, searching for his sister's ghost or for any other reason. Others say he died too that horrid day, left the worlds godless. Others say he sleeps through the stars until the galaxy needs him.

 

The Light and the Dark left behind their gods before they both died, though. Godless heathens who forgot their own deities even before they abandoned them.

 

Akozé survives. She roosts in her own trees and spreads tales. She watches over the Children that have not forgotten.

 

There is no lesson, only an ending.

 

My little Starkiller.

 

 

 

“Come in, Supreme Leader.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly I do not remember when I started writing this but its done and I feel the vaguest sense of victory known to man.


End file.
